Are Facebook Groups the Future of Businesses or Will We Find Ourselves in a Deadlock?

Conde Nast Traveler is a renowned luxury and lifestyle travel magazine published by Conde Nast. It has won more than 25 different National Magazine awards. Last year, Conde Nast Traveler did something completely out-of-the-box with their social media marketing strategy. Instead of opting-in for new followers through clickbait and promo codes, the magazine asked people to join their female traveler group.

To enter the group, all an applicant had to do was explain why the Group was important to them and whether they would adhere to the community guidelines. Today, the group has more than 50,000 members and is titled the “Women Who Travel.” Where many brands are deeply struggling with keeping their brand budgets intact, Conde Nast Traveler is running so many activities that these brands can only dream of.

Since Facebook Group strategy worked remarkably well for Conde Nast, they had the audacity to implement this same exact strategy across eight of their other brands including big names such as The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Allure, BRIDES, Golf Digest, SELF and Teen Vogue.

Conde Nast Traveler Magazine is just one among many who are opting-in for Facebook Groups so they can create a resonating vibe around their label. Countless others are in the same boat.

However, the real question still remains unheeded; Will Facebook Groups become a gateway for businesses to earn success or will they find themselves in a deadlock in just a handful of years?

Throwing a Spotlight on Facebook Group Statistics

Facebook Groups tout over 1.4 billion active users and almost half of this Facebook’s massive user base is found engaged in a topic of their interest in different Facebook Groups every month. Approximately, 200 million of these people belong to “Meaningful Groups.”

Meaningful Groups are not any sophomore year college student Groups discussing crazy parties or homework sessions; these are actually highly-engaged collective units that play a significant role in establishing the future of Facebook. The aim of their establishment works behind the wheel of Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s big motto of “bringing the world closer together.”

On one occasion, Mark Zuckerberg revealed that he fancies seeing the numbers increase five folds in the next five years and reach a total of billion users.

The Big Reason Behind the Hyper-Growth of Groups

The hyper-growth of Facebook Groups is not a hidden knowledge and neither is how it happened. Facebook’s own algorithm shift and platform tweaks explained a part of it way before the Cambridge Analytica debacle took place. The platform recalibrated the algorithm to prioritize engagement with friends, family, and Groups for its audience and hence resulted in downgrading public content shared by businesses, brands, and media. In the wake of effective community building, we are now seeing more posts from Groups and far fewer posts from company Pages.

Only a few months back, Facebook introduced a dedicated Groups tab inside their mobile app so users can arrange all their groups in one place and even search for relevant ones. Plus, it includes additional screening and post scheduling tools which makes it a whole lot easier for Groups to build and scale.

However, when you see through the cultural lens, the year 2018 has not fared too well for social media such as Facebook, and has resulted in spreading a feeling of mistrust. Back in the days, Facebook largely represented a hometown of interactions where many friends and family members were able to easily let their guard down and share the daily happenings of their lives and feeler closer to each other in a nurtured environment.

But as more and more people entered the fold, these numbers exceeded at an alarming rate and reached several billion users in just a couple of days. Facebook started looking more like the Wild West.

Every time you logged in at Facebook, you would find your Newsfeed replete with click baits, recipe videos or some other brandss marketing their product/service through a Facebook page. What used to be a real & refreshing experience for users around the world, suddenly became an advertisement board.

All of this ultimately resulted in making the option of joining groups a whole lot more appealing. Entering one required an approval from an admin. Dialogues became healthy and productive. Suggestions turned useful and more actionable. Snarks and sarcasm went down to a bare minimum. Things looked good.

But for a while…

The Future of Facebook Groups

Hence, coming back to the question of whether Facebook Groups will become a pinnacle for brands and businesses or will they become a fiasco? Will it be successful to overcome the issue of declining reach or addressing engagement? Moreover, will the concept become an able source of winning the lost trust and authenticity which they cultivated through their endless endeavors to sell product/services?

There is no denying the fact that Facebook wants businesses to make use of the Facebook Groups. In fact, last year it allowed brand Pages the ability to create and moderate groups for individual profiles. However, things didn’t go well as businesses became too eager to reach out to their customers.

For example, Health tracker Fitbit went viral with almost a dozen Facebook Groups in major cities. Although the company had millions of followers on their main Facebook page; it hardly struggled to retain even a thousand members in Groups.

As a result, Facebook received mixed results on which it was not so sure to present any strong analysis.

On the other hand, brands are now well-trained in creating such a space where passionate users can easily express their feelings and opinions. They work as moderators and admins behind the curtains and keep the discussions prominent and alive. Peloton, an indoor cycling workout company has more than 100,000 members in its official group. The group entertains more than 300 posts and over 5,000 comments each day. But, how did they survive this long? Admin members at Peloton actively flag content and actively delete any content that violates the community guidelines.

In the end, brands that create Groups and sit in the background allowing customers to connect with each other and exchange information are really rubbing some magic lamp there.

Recently, LinkedIn is offering more than 500+ million users on their network the ability to share images, video and receive comments in notifications. And by the looks of it, this option has just sent Facebook Groups at a high risk of losing its particular charm in the social media world.